RedLine is pleased to announce they are the central hub for the Month of Photography Denver. Among many events planned, the top feature is the exhibition The Reality of Fiction: The realities and absurdities of our modern age, curated by Mark Sink. This is the second biennial in which RedLine has served as the nerve center for Month of Photography Denver with lectures, portfolio reviews and exhibitions, including The Big Picture, an international exhibition of large scale contemporary photography.
This featured exhibition is a survey of photographers who explore the subject of reality and fiction in this new millennium. Photographs will range from serious social documentation to humorous play of the absurdities our modern culture including the following:
Lori Nix(New York, NY) – Accidentally Kansas
Nix is interested in depicting danger and disaster tempered with a touch of humor. Having grown up in a rural part of the United States, known more for its natural disasters than anything else, each passing season brought its own drama -from winter snow storms, spring floods and tornados to summer insect infestations and drought. Whereas most adults viewed these seasonal disruptions with angst, for a child it was euphoric. In this series, Nix recreates the excitement of downed trees, mud, and even grass fires in comparison to mundane, daily life.
T. John Hughes (Denver, CO) – Architectural Apparitions
In this series Hughes becomes not only a photographer, but a researcher and a bit of a detective. He often spends time thinking about how earlier lives had occupied various spaces. The detective work comes in as he searches to find the right spot where some earlier subjects existed. A distant hill, an almost hidden roof, or some other clue helps orient the older image to the current setting– one of the most rewarding aspects of the whole process. Hughes is motivated by “the preservation of memory” and how photography enables the viewer to experience or re-experience a past that otherwise might be unreachable.
Emily Peacock (Houston, TX) – You, Me & Diane
Staging herself into the most famous of Diane Arbus images, Peacock believes Arbus was interested in these subjects because she felt she had something in common with them. By recreating her images, Peacock hopes to gain a greater understanding of Arbus’s point of view. You, Me & Diane also embodies Peacock’s unflinching sense of humor as she takes on the admittedly absurd task of recreating an already remarkable collection images.
Sally Stockhold (Denver, CO) – Ode to Icon and other Absurdities. In these portraits – Stockhold uses herself as the “canvas” to depict iconic females and some iconic males from history and fiction.
James Soe Nyun (San Diego, CA)
Humorous recreations are created from some of our most iconic photographs like Ansel Adams’ “Half Dome Yosemite ” made out of tofu and cheese. Or Paul Strands famous “Taos Church” he recreates out of bread. “Beyond photography’s technical applications, it’s not a far step to reportage or documentary photography–areas where photography’s supposed unobtrusiveness are too often taken as the uninflected truth.”
Rebecca Martinez (San Francisco, CA) – pretenders
This series documents the growing movement of women who nurture hyper-realistic fake babies. The photographs explore different aspects of artifice and our impulses to create illusionary objects and situations that fulfill various emotional, spiritual, and psychological needs.
Joe Clower (Denver, CO) – UFO Polaroids
Clower’s images captured on Polaroid instant films are admired by UFO hunters and believers worldwide. Clower won the UFO Magazine photo contest in April 1998 and cover of the 1999 UFO calendar.
Christine Buschsbaum (Denver, CO)
Performance-based documentation of personal experience, Buchsbaum’s photographs are a reshaping of events that shaped her -strange mysteries of a strange world, narratives of an underlying consciousness. The supposed photographs are candid, but only because the events depicted actually happened. They aren’t really “real.” They are staged from memories of her life and the defining moments that shape time, space and what is worth being.
Greta Pratt(Norfolk, VA) – Azalea Trail Maids
One of the more unusual rituals of Southern society takes place every year in Mobile, Alabama, when high school girls from throughout the county compete for the opportunity to become an Azalea Trail Maid. If chosen, the girls work with a milliner to create a dream dress in their assigned color. Each dress is unique but must adhere to a specific set of standards that include a hoop skirt with steel rods, a continuous ruffle at the top of the bodice, cotton pantaloons along with a matching parasol, and a taffeta lined hat. The Trail Maids have appeared in parades throughout the nation acting as ambassadors of southern hospitality.
Phillip Toledano (New York, NY) – New Kind of Beauty
Toledano’s work explores how beauty has always been a currency, and now that we finally have the technological means to mint our own, what choices do we make?
Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? Defined by the surgeon’s hand? Can we identify physical trends that vary from decade to decade, or is beauty timeless? When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our true character, or are we stripping away our very identity?
Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty -an amalgamation of surgery, art, and popular culture. If so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?
Edie Winograde (Denver, CO) – Place and Time: Reenactment Pageant Photographs
History is the collective memory of past experience. In the ongoing series Place and Time, Winograde photographs staged pageants, re-enactments of incidents (legendary or real) in American history presented in their original locales. Her interest in these events–aside from the obvious visual appeal of the extravagant theatrics–is to underscore their quality of mimesis and déjà vu.
Michael Ensminger (Denver, CO) – Zottelbart
Ensminger’s Zottelbart is a series of black-and-white, self-portraits taken over the last eleven years in and around the high country forests of Colorado. This work reflects the artist’s unique and local take on the ”Nude Babe in the wilderness” motif.
Conor King (Denver, CO) – Mergence
The photographs in this series are digital montages composed of several images arranged to make a cohesive whole. However, upon inspection, seam lines between the individual images are visible. Also visible are samplings of the characters’ clothing patterns and computer code from the digital file woven into the environments. King hopes that the images reveal themselves slowly, allowing viewers to experience a transition of understanding from truth to fiction.
RedLine, a 501(c)(3) public charity, is a diverse urban laboratory where contemporary art, education, and community converge. The gallery’s vision is to foster forms of social practice in the arts that inspire inquiry and catalyze change. Located in Denver’s Historic Five Points neighborhood, RedLine combines an artist residency program with project-based community engagement in art.
Participating Artists :
Reiner Riedler – Sarah Martin – J.Frede – Katie Taft – Johns Bonath – Pablo Gimenez Zapiola – Liz Greene – Adam Milner – Nina Berman – Sarah Haney – Susan Anderson – Justin Beard – Zach Reini – Harry Walters
EXPOSITION
The Reality of Fiction: The realities and absurdities of our modern age
March 8 – April 28, 2013
RedLine
2350 Arapahoe Street
Denver CO 80205
USA
